There is a problem with the word “myth” in our culture. We believe that a myth isn’t ‘true’..but that’s only partially correct. A myth may not be true in the literal sense, but any good myth points at deep and hidden truth. Michael Meade, regarded as one of the foremost experts on mythology is here to give us the codes on how to decode a myth, and find the often shockingly profound lessons hidden within. We go through a few of these myths on the podcast including myths of collapse and renewal, re-creation stories, the role of the elder in mentoring troubled youth, and how telling better stories can guide us through the challenges of modernity.

Check out Michael Meade's book | https://www.mosaicvoices.org/books

AUBREY: Absolutely. So it seems that we're in a time of transformation for our society right now, for our world story. It seems more important now to have stories that can guide us through these transitions that we're facing. This seems like one of the most important things that we can do. So I'm really excited to have this conversation, because that's what we're here to do is we're here to allow these old stories, let them become new stories, so that they can guide us through our specific time with the wisdom of the stories that have been told for many, many, many years, and perhaps weaving in the new contextuals that make this story even more relevant. So when you think about the story for our time, right now, what are some of the stories that start to come alive for you, when you start thinking about where we are right now as a culture?

MICHAEL: The first one is a style of story, a style of myth from ancient Greece, which is referred to in ancient Greek as apocalypsis, which then becomes Latinized, and then becomes part of the Christian Bible, and it becomes apocalypse. But it originally did not mean a fiery end of everything or zombies, didn't really include zombies--

AUBREY: There will be people disappointed that it doesn't include zombies, actually. 

MICHAEL: The zombies could be a good modern addition, I think maybe. But anyway, the word means collapse-renewal, collapse-renewal. That's one way to understand what we're going through. We're at the end of an era. In a sense, the world has already ended in the world that we had or thought that we had. The new one hasn't shown up yet. So we're in a dislocated condition, mythologically and even cosmologically. But I think it's helpful to imagine that at the end of an era, you get collapse and renewal, the way in a forest, the big trees, even the ancient trees will finally fall down and they'll rot back into the earth, and they'll be the food of the next forest coming up. We're in that falling down, rotting down, place but secretly the forest of life is creating new life. In a way I imagine our job is to witness the collapse and find a way to contribute to the recreation. Mythologically, the world can't end. To me, that's a helpful idea. I can't prove it. If it does end, there's not going to be anybody around to say I was wrong. But the word end doesn't mean finito, goodnight, goodbye. The word end really refers to a remnant or a loose end. The old mythological idea is that the next world is made from the loose ends of the one that just collapsed. So the end is the beginning.

AUBREY: This is ultimately the myth of the Phoenix played out in its entirety. It's the burning down into ash and then from the ashes rises a bird of new feathers. This is something that we have to personally experience many, many times in our life as our separate self, the separate self of our identity and our personality, it doesn't actually change all that much. People think that our personality or our identity changes but, really, actually, it dies and is reborn. That's why it's always so painful to change. It's uncomfortable in the process of actually allowing these things to go down to ash, allowing the forest that we've nurtured and cared for and putting our energy into to burn. It requires a little bit of faith to get through the other side, to trust, then on the other side, the green shoots will sprout up and there'll be an even healthier ecosystem that we'll be able to thrive in on the other side.

MICHAEL: Yep. Trust is what people don't have now because people have been putting their trust in the social institutions, in the political theories, in the political process and that's not working. So people have lost trust. That's one reason people are so divided, I think. There's no story. People don't even think they're in the same story now. People think you're not in the story I'm in if you don't agree to the interpretation of the story. That creates a lack of trust, and then it's a real downhill roll from there. Then what I suggest is the outer world is not going to be fixed next week, next election. We don't know when it comes back together with more coherence. So then, like you're suggesting, we have to find coherence inside. We have to find a sense of deeper unity inside. That's a real challenge to modern people who have not been living in story, who have not necessarily been helped to see that there is a deeper self or the soul or something in a person, like you say, after we burn down, there's something that doesn't burn, that can fire us back up again, as a matter of fact, a deep of fire, a deeper wisdom that is part of the human inheritance, but most people don't know that now. Most people think they're empty inside. That's why they are clinging so hard to things in the outside world. They're afraid that they're empty inside.

AUBREY: It seems as if the self can actually model the story for the collective, almost like we first need the story of the self, that the self can burn and be reborn, because there is something I love that, as you said, unburnable, the unborn, the undying, the unburnable aspect of our true self. That which is true is always true, that part of us that exists beyond all of the entropy of the world. If we can find that within ourselves, then we can actually start to really believe it in the collective as well but in the absence of knowing that in our selfhood, it becomes incredibly challenging to imagine that in the collective. It's still challenging, even if you know it in the self, to then extend it to the collective, but it seems like a prerequisite to actually understand it. First, is the story of the self and then we can extrapolate that as a collective story.

MICHAEL: I couldn't agree more. I would suggest. Here's another way to think about the condition we're in, I've been suggesting we're in a collective rite of passage, humanity is trying to make a passage from the divisiveness that has happened, or from the lack of inclusiveness that is common, to a passage into a more inclusive, more imaginative, more compassionate version of humanity. But it can't happen as a group. It's actually the individual self and soul, like you were saying. That's the old idea. No change in the soul, no change in the world. So now you have the problem of modern people who think we live in an accidental universe, where things don't really make sense. That's part of the science and the philosophy in the modern world, and have not been given the opportunity to figure out that they have this deeper self, deeper soul, and have to imagine how the whole human culture, how does society transform. And then it turns out, it can only go from the individual soul, that's where the change happens. Then that eventually moves the culture. And that's, like you say, that's a hard thing to realize. And once you realize that you actually have more weight and pressure in a funny way. And yet, pressure intention is the necessary precedent for being creative. So it's a very creative time, if you can stand the pressure.

AUBREY: The pressure actually is a necessary part of the story. This is a very key part of what must happen is we must feel, we must feel the pressure almost. It's this moment in the chrysalis where it has to get sticky and confined and hot. It's what creates. It's the forge, so to speak, for what is emergent. It is actual heat and the tension of that heat that is required. I think a lot of people would like the end result, the butterfly, without the chrysalis, which cannot exist. If you can get that, then you can start to re-understand maybe instead of lamenting, “Oh, woe is me, I can't believe this is all happening,” you could say, "Okay, I understand this. I know what part of the story we're in." Let's find the beauty in this moment by having that trust, like you said, the trust and the faith of what's to come in the next moment, when we transition through this. That changes your whole mental landscape. That's something that when you really get that, you can actually enjoy the heat and enjoy the pressure, and know that you are the one who can hold that, for those who are lost and for those who are hurting, which so many people are, just say "It's okay. It's okay." We're very mimetic by nature, we look to others to see, are we okay? I liken it to when you're on an airplane, and you're experiencing really rough turbulence, and maybe you hear some funny sounds in the jet, you look over to the steward and stewardesses and you look over, and you and you look at them, and if they look nervous, everybody would be really nervous. But when they're calm, and they're playing their Sudoku, it's like, "Oh, yeah, we've seen this before," then everybody calms down. I think it's important for those of us who understand the nature of these stories to hold that center, and hold that center and say, "No, it's alright. This is how it must be and this is how it will always be. And we're going to make it through."

MICHAEL: I think part of the problem comes when, if you follow the Phoenix, that's a big descent. The plane doesn't keep going, it goes into this big descent, which puts everyone in the ashes. In fairy tales, they have what they call the ashes time. And we're in the ashes time. We're in the leftovers of the previous world view. In a sense, with the invasion of Ukraine, where we live in World War II, in a sense. The images look like World War II all over again so there's cycling down through aspects of history. On the individual level, there's going down into the dark parts of my own self, parts that I have to face that maybe I don't want to face. That's, I think, one of the big problems is people begin to feel the weight pushing everybody down. COVID has done that to people, people going through isolation, confusion, and all kinds of things. I think that's where the trouble comes in. Then you have this tension on a psychological level, we could say, between the ego which can be referred to as the little self, and the deep self that you've been talking about, except that it's under pressure and in darkness. One of the stories I like to tell now, Native American story, is a story about how healing began. The first people didn't even know that there was healing, they didn't even know that was sickness. When some people got sick, no one knew what to do so they ignored them. They began to waste away and start to die. Then finally, four people went out and stood facing the dark with this problem, this weight, this inner darkness, of not knowing what's going on. They didn't even know what sickness was, much less what it is the sickness. Then in this beautiful old story, it says the one who made the Earth spoke to them, and said, "On the earth, for every illness, there's a cure. For every sickness, there's a remedy. For every trouble, there's a solution." That was the first knowledge they had about the world. I think we're like those four people, that those of us that are interested, those of us that can handle some of the weight, those of us that are willing to witness the collapse and look for the shoots that are trying to come up, I like those four original people looking into the darkness. I think that's such a challenge to modern Western culture. No strategic plan applies. You can't make the next strategic plan if you're waiting for knowledge to come out of the darkness. I think it's really challenging in the fact that it's deep descent and in the fact that not knowing is very problematic for the heroic Western psyche.

AUBREY: So this seems like a failure of the story. It's a failure of the story, which is the story that there's always a solution that we should know and we should be planning two steps ahead. It's like the story of the chess player. We all know chess. We know that we are supposed to plan multiple moves ahead and know everything. But chess is a game with a finite set of rules and a finite set of moves, which is ultimately why a computer can beat everybody in chess, because it can play out all of these different scenarios. It didn't always used to be that case. But by now, computers can beat anybody. It's the same kind of computational analysis of the world whereas we should be able to algorithmically predict and strategize every other move. But that's the wrong story. The story has served us in many ways. It's allowed us to create all kinds of incredible technology, all kinds of incredible innovation. But the story that has to be told is a story that no, no, no, actually, the descent into darkness is actually dark. It's actually unknown. It's actually invisible to us at this point, and there will be legitimate confusion. When we have that story, we say, okay, so we're not supposed to know. We're not supposed to have everything figured out. There's going to be something emergent, collectively emergent, more intelligent than any one person could plan that is going to come out of this descent.

MICHAEL: So it's reshaping knowledge, in a sense, going back. I love how you keep mentioning stories. It's in the ancient stories that these ideas already exist. The old sense is that when something is forgotten in the world, it doesn't disappear, it falls back into story, just the way the basic energy of the world doesn't disappear; it falls back somewhere. We almost have to find ways to go back and be willing to stand in the darkness. If you break not knowing down or learning down, we can only learn at the edge of what we know. Not knowing is the only legitimate step to knowing more than I already know. It's re-teaching us, beginner's mind, if you want but it's really challenging to the Western ego ever since the enlightenment, trying to say we could create everything, we could fix everything, a little bit ironic, in a way, because what did the enlightenment lead to, but figuring out that the world was 84% dark matter, dark energy and damn black holes? So the enlightenment led to darkness and the collapse of the world view leads to darkness also. There's this real return to the origins of knowledge in the ancient way that people used to be more reverent for the unknown and the unseen. And I think that's a real challenge to the modern world.

AUBREY: One of the stories that I was hearing you tell, you talk about the River Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. It seems like we have heavy doses of this river of forgetfulness in many ways, sometimes in shot glasses, sometimes in giant gallon jugs, sometimes we're bathing in it. The key point that you were making is that on the other side of that, is that there is a knowing, there is a knowing that's underneath that forgetfulness. So it's like the story is actually known, and the truth is actually known. And it's actually not that we need to discover it, it's that we need to remember it. So I was hoping maybe you could dive into some of this myth, because I think it's very important. It helps remind us why we should have a little more faith, why we can have a little trust because we're not waiting for something new. We're actually just trying to remember what we forgot.

MICHAEL: Well said. Yes. So this is ancient Greek mythology also. So the ancient Greeks had the idea that the underworld was right there below our feet, and you could fall into it at any moment. Feeling sad or depressed was considered falling into the underworld. They had this dynamic relationship to the underworld, which I find really helpful because in the modern world, you can fall right out of things in a moment, when you find out about the latest tragedy or the latest problem from the climate crisis, many crises that we're facing. So they had a populated underworld that was the source of knowledge. There were two rivers in the underworld. One ran on one side, the River Lethe. Lethe is the word from which we get lethal, lethargy. So that's why the river of forgetfulness was called the river of unmindfulness, or the river of forgetfulness. Then on the opposite side, running in the opposite direction, was the River Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne is the word from which we get memory. It's the river of deep memory. All of us, at times, fall into that Lethe, I agree. It's bottled and sold, and widely consumed as a spirit of forgetting. Forgetting is necessary at certain points but there's also the deep remembering. So the River Mnemosyne would go back to the well of deep memory. The old idea in many indigenous cultures is that each person's soul is tied to the soul of the world, and has access to the deep well of memory. So there's things inside us that actually know things that we don't know. Then the other important thing about the River Mnemosyne or the stream of remembering is that Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses. The Muses are all the arts. The arts are the antidote to all the forgetting. Also the arts, the daughters of Mnemosyne are the Muses who are the source of inspiration, muses are from which we get the word musical. Museum means house of the Muses. And not only that, we get amusing from the Muses. So the comedians and the artists and painters and the writers are all being inspired by the Muses. Most people don't even know it. I know artists that don't know that. So people don't realize that in the state of accepting, we don't know, all of a sudden, there's room for the Muses to come in and inspire us. There's this whole great river of knowledge that I want to echo what you said. We are here to remember that and to remember means to bring the members that aren't present into consciousness, members, parts of ourselves, to piece it back together all that has fallen apart and been forgotten. So this is a really powerful time to be alive if a person can accept that it's falling apart. Here's another idea that I like, that when it's not working, when everything is seems to be falling apart, there is an acceleration of calling, having a calling, having a vocation, becomes more possible or the message can get through, because the instability of the environment, the cracking of the shell of culture, allows these messages from the River Mnemosyne, from memory, from the other world, from the Muses, however you want to name it. The things that are not measurable, the things that are the source of creation, and even the source of the human can get through more as the things around us become less solid.

AUBREY: It seems that this becomes obvious when we look at ourselves in a way and again, using the self as a model for the bigger stories, which is a great way to model it, obviously doesn't exhaust all of the stories to use the self but it can model the stories. And to understand that in our moments, in our own dark nights of the soul, in those times where things are challenging and we're heartbroken and things are difficult, what comes out of us? Usually our greatest passions, our greatest inspirations. Unfortunately, we have a culture that is trying to sell us and convince us that we should never go to the underworld. Oh, you're sad, depressed, heartbroken? Take this pill, do this thing, fix this immediately, this is not good, rather than this other story, which is no no, no, this is normal, this is what we all do. This is your time in the underworld, honor that, accept that, have your community that can hold the space for you and say yes, go. Explore down there in Hades for as long as you need. Take as long, take as much time, talk to as many people down there, feel as many things, explore as much as you like, and we'll be there with you on on the other side as well and potentially even, we're willing to go down there with you and be there with you in the darkness. That's compassion, really; compassion with suffering, with someone suffering. That's the real root of compassion is not that I feel bad for you, let me, up here, pity you. Compassion is I'm with you, I'll go down there with you, I'll feel what you feel, we'll go in this together and then we'll come out of this together, and we'll be even more inspired and we'll be filled with that greater level of passion. That's this key idea that is not part of our current Zeitgeist. It's not part of our current cultural story, which is, the descent to the underworld; the underworld is bad, avoid at all cost and ameliorate it all at any price, whether that's through some drug or some escape or some other thing. This ultimately creates problems because the cycle, the flow of nature can't actually flow the way that it was designed, which is like a wave form, descends down into the underworld, accelerating the heights back into the upper worlds.

MICHAEL: Yeah, part of what's been lost is the whole sense of the regenerative energy of nature, the recreative or energy of the world. So human nature is secretly connected to great nature. That was one of the big divisions that happened when Western world got fascinated with subject/object and pretended that they weren't secretly connected. We lost the connection to nature and to the earth. But our human nature is secretly connected like to those deep rivers, and to the deep emotions, but especially to this regenerative recreative of energy. You said it earlier, that we're really supposed to die and be born again and again. When I meet someone who says, "I'm born again," I say, yeah, keep going. It's not one time born again. In the course of life, the old idea is die before you die. That was the old statement, or the Irish have a proverb that says that death is the middle of a long life. In other words, if we don't let the little self die, we will die, or we'll be back in the zombie form. We'll be walking around but not alive. African proverb, “when death finds you, let it find you alive.” That's what we're supposed to, they used to be a division between little death and big death. Big death comes at the end, and it has a finality to it. Little death is supposed to happen many times along the way. We die a little and we grow a lot. This is the time of ashes. This is the time of accepting that kind of dying, dying of the ego so that the self or the soul can expand; another old idea. If you're going through a difficult time or a tragic time, you're either going to come out a smaller person, or a bigger soul. If you come out the same, it wasn't really a tragic time, it wasn't really a true struggle. So every time we're in the struggle, we're in the birth canal in a way. We're either going to come out a smaller person or we let go a bit, we allow that descent, we suffer the darkness. There is something, according to the old stories, and I'm sticking with them, inside everyone that is really here to be reborn again and again. This is that time, and I really like how you're talking about it. Most people do not get it. There's a whole bunch, I call it like we're on the threshold. We're in the collective rite of passage, on the threshold. And some people are looking backwards, wanting to get back to what they thought was something back there, which really wasn't there anyway. But anyway, some people are looking back and other people are confused, walking around on the threshold and some people are looking forward to trying to get glimpses of where the paths might be. The troubles in the world, from my perspective, are so big, they're called global nowadays. They're intractable and they're wildly complex. So there's no simple solution. There's no heroic move that makes it better. It seems to me it's going to take a whole lot of people waking up to who they are inside. I call it finding the inner genius, because genius, the word originally means the spirit you're born with, genius. The genius knows where we're supposed to be going. When enough people realize I'm going to take the chance and follow my genius, some of those people will figure out how to invent medicines, and others know how to help heal rivers and re-root forests, genius-like. It's going to take a whole bunch of genius activity for many, many people. It's not going to be a new idea, it's not going to be an election or something. From my perspective, that's going to allow this big transition to occur. Many people are waking up to why they came into the world to begin with and taking a chance on living that out. When that happens, it doesn't have to be coordinated completely. We'd have to agree. We can disagree. But if all the genius capacities are in play, you have innovation, you have invention, you have new kinds of healing, you have new ideas of how to create inclusive communities. All of a sudden, from the bottom up, from the inside out, you get a change of human culture and the next thing, someday, someone says, "Hey, I think we're in a new world." So that's what I'm counting on.

AUBREY: What I see a lot of people talk about, these forces of control that they're hypothesizing and creating a lot of stories about. Whether these stories have any validity or not, is not my concern. The stories are that there's forces of control, and it certainly appears that there's those forces of control, but really that's just an externalized extrapolation of our own forces of control, our own belief that we need to figure it out, and that we'll have the right answers. The hubris of certain individuals to say, "Actually, my genius is better and more important than everybody else's genius. So I know the way. If I could just control everybody and get everybody to do what I say, then we'll fix the problem." It's, again, just an extrapolation of that personal belief, and not trusting in the collective genius to say, "Listen, we need everybody's help." We need everybody to be bright eyed, open-hearted, wide awake, to help us through this time. So let's push everything out to actually lessen the control, to actually give people deeper access to their own genius, and allow them to share that and allow them to express and sing their sacred song, so that the chorus itself will guide us by the hidden hand of what is being remembered. I think that's really what we're facing here. It's just a poverty of trust and imagination, where they're over-indexing their own intelligence and under-indexing that collective creative intelligence of all people to kind of guide us through.

MICHAEL: I completely agree with you. The word imagination is key in the process. I call it a loss of vertical imagination. So humans, in a sense, are born from the Earth. We're Earthlings but we're also the descendants of the stars. The ancient idea was human beings are partly in the animal world, and partly in the heavens. We're stretched between. We're the most unusual of the animal production but also, we're almost hybrids of the angels too. And so, part of the awakening of a person is supposed to be this greater awareness of this being stretched between the heavens and the deep Earth. When a person gets that, they get vertical imagination. And when a person has a vertical imagination, the descent to darkness isn't as scary because you have a realization that in that darkness, there's an imagination there. At the same time, a person can eventually figure out how to handle the heights better. Most people the first time they go up, Icarus-like, they go too far. We watch that in modern culture all the time, people rising and falling very quickly, that everything happens quickly now, but that includes people descending, who then fall down really fast. The old idea was circulation, that a person in their life goes through the heights and through the depths over and over again, in an alchemical cooking of their own psyche. At the end of a world or end of an era, everything moves faster and faster. So the heights and the lows come quicker. Having some knowledge that this is possible, that the human psyche can stretch that way, it can change that way, is really helpful. When that kind of understanding and imagination isn't there, the world seems not only troubled, but it seems dangerous. That's what I keep hearing from people, that people feel overwhelmed, that they feel anxious when they don't know why they're anxious. We have collective anxiety, and it goes back to where we started from. If a person doesn't know that they have a deep self, deep soul, you can use either term, they don't have anywhere to turn to. And so the expectation, as you were saying, is too heavily indexed in the outer world. This is the time to have an inner life and to have a greater sense of who I am and why I came here. Just to put one more turn on it, and you already mentioned it is that we usually wake up to who we are when we're in the darkest time. The darkness and the weight of sorrow, the weight of, and the trouble, brought on by fear begins to melt the ego attitude. The realization is no, I can't fix it. I'm not even sure I can handle it. Let go of that a little bit and then something starts to arise that was waiting to become known. That's the old idea. People are not empty. Everyone comes into the world gifted and aimed. The struggles of life are there to strip away the things that are in the way so that we can realize how we're aimed, and what gifts we have to give. I think of all the young people growing up now, growing into a world that's falling apart, a world that's often upside down, a world that doesn't make sense. There needs to be a different kind of story told to young people, so that they can navigate, or else everybody heads for the River Lethe and says, "Let's just get lethargic and take whatever we can take, to zone out from the weight of what we're facing."

AUBREY: It seems that one of the challenges that we face is that we've fallen into a trap of either literalizing or trivializing the story. I think one of the things that yourself and even Jordan Peterson does a great job of this, and a lot of different individuals do, is they start to actually take these stories that may seem trivial. "Oh, this is just a Disney movie” or “this is just a fable about an animal, this is just something.” They'll either trivialize it, which means they don't get the actual deep meaning, the symbolic meaning of the understanding, or they'll literalize it like in the case of the Greeks. They might think that the Greeks really just believed that there was an actual place under the ground, if they dug far enough, they'd get down there and there was an actual river, two actual rivers and they had to cross and they had to pay the ferryman with an actual coin. Maybe they did; some of them actually literalized those myths. I'm not saying that that didn't occasionally occur. Maybe that was actually the norm, even if so, there was a deeper truth that's underneath the story that you have to allow the story to work on you and see beyond what the initial optics of it are to actually understand this is actually a guiding story, this is a very important story. We do this with our own Bible, we do this with so many books of stories and tales, where we actually don't get to the truth that the story is pointing to. I think that's, one of the important things that storytellers like yourself are offering, and so many other people, is saying yes, we need new stories, but we also just need to understand the truth that was at the root of many of these great stories that have existed in the past without trivializing or literalizing them and find what it really means.

MICHAEL: Yeah, the stories in traditional cultures were read psychologically. So the story wasn't a literal map. It was a psychological territory you could enter. Yeah, that's a missing thing. There's been a real exaggeration of the value of logic and rationality. So the ancient Greeks had two ways of accounting to the world. One was called logos from which we get logic, measuring, weighing, collecting facts and all that kind of thing. The other was called mythos, narrative intelligence. Mythos included all of the emotions. It wasn't just a story. How does the story make me feel? When I tell a story, when you get to have an audience, we haven't had that for a while but when the audience has come back, I'll tell part of a story and say, "Where are you in that story?" It's amazing because people are in all different places. You can only meet a story with your life. If there's a dog and I say there's a dog in the story, and I don't describe it, people have white dogs and black dogs, and brown and spotted dogs and hounds, and wieners, and everything. As people listen to the story, they're populating the room with all these animals, just because I mentioned dogs. The psyche is so quick and it's so full of imagination, that we will match as listeners everything in the story. So stories were there, to put us in this other world, this mythos, this place where we can feel better, our own emotions, and actually begin to learn the shapes of our own psyche. I think we have to go back to the story and I think the best stories right now are, there's a lot of creation stories. Actually, there's an untold number of creation stories. Most cultures, even a tiny tribe, have more than one creation story. The Bible has, at least, two in it. So creation is so manifold, it needs lots of stories. But I've been focusing on what I call recreation stories, stories about how the world renews after it burns down or after it falls apart. I think that recreative energy is what everybody needs to find. I want to mention one other thing. Traditional cultures would have some kind of rite of passage for girls and boys. In a healthy traditional culture, it would be for girls and for boys and it would happen somewhere after adolescence, what we would call teenage years. That would be a process that would take each young person out of the family, out of the community circumstances, away from everybody that they know and put them in ritual circumstances, which could be challenging or even ordeals. A famous one, which is easy to access, is a vision quest, where you go into nature. All of the old rites were in nature. They weren't in the community. They were in nature so that what was happening, one of the understandings was each child is being moved from the lap of their mother, to the lap of Mother Nature. It was like a rebirth into a world that was on one hand, natural, on the other hand, was deeply psychological because each person would have their own vision, they would have their own experience. They would actually realize they were a unique being on this earth, not because of a textbook. They would know it from their own body, and their own embodied experience. And then since everybody's wounded, this is another old idea in stories, everyone that's born is wounded, no family can take care of a child perfectly. That's why everybody leaves home. If you don't leave home, you could remain a child your whole life. And so, they would make sure that everybody left home, and everybody had this revelatory experience, the revealing of who I am from inside myself, and then there would be some kind of a wound involved, which would be a symbolic representation of the fact that everybody's already wounded. There would be healing that happens so that what we would call adults would be people who had an awakened experience of themselves and had experienced healing and compare that to the modern world. You get people elected to office of high power who won't admit that they're wounded, and who probably never had an awakened experience at home. So we're missing that. So when we say, "Yeah, everybody has genius inside. Everybody has imagination, everybody has a meaningful path to be called to," but most people haven't had the experience of awakening to that and most people haven't had early life traumas and wounds healed in any way. So what looks like adults are really people in big bodies with very early life, traumatic disorders, and often a lack of genuine sense that my life has meaning. That makes it really hard to change a culture, much less, salvage people.

AUBREY: I credit so much of my own life path and own I am from vision quests that I went on when I was 18, just finishing high school, going off to college, my dad had the sense to send me off with a shaman in the mountains of New Mexico. Spent a couple of days in a hut. And the shaman gave me some psychedelic mushroom tea, some psilocybin tea, and left me out there in the wild. It was a stormy wild night, I'm in this hut and everything was different after that. I emerged from that hut, I was up all night, huddled by the fire, and just every aspect of my entire life experience, up to that point, that was the line of demarcation. I've had many of those moments subsequently but that first one, showed me the power of these rites of passage. It doesn't mean that everybody has to follow the exact same path that I did. Of course not. The rites of passage cannot be underestimated, or overstated in their importance, because it's absolutely crucial. I know personally, that I wouldn't be a fraction of what I am, who I am on the inside and the outside, because the inside and the outside mirrors each other, if it wasn't for that early moment. I think you're spot on.

MICHAEL: Yeah, they don't marry each other until you're cracked open. So that was the whole idea, as the person got cracked. Psychologically, what's being cracked is the ego, the little self, that thinks it knows where it comes from, or drives a car or owns property, whatever, gets cracked, and it gets open. Then you realize the movement of the stars and the nature of the storm and whatever animals are shown and whatever dreams came are real, because there's nothing interfering with them and that healing is possible, because you survived the ordeal and you feel better for having had the ordeal. So I think what happens is everybody has the ordeals anyway. If I have a big audience, and I'll say, "How many people have felt separated from everybody, either because you were sick and had to go to the hospital and leave your friends and family or because someone you love died, and you were thrown into the world of death, when other people are just walking around normally, or you got arrested or you went to war? Whatever it was, how many people have had, that's called separation." All the hands go up. And sometimes two hands are going up. Everybody's had it but it wasn't handled like a ritual experience. It wasn't framed like you were saying about stories. Their own story wasn't made real. People are carrying wounds that are like initiatory experiences that will keep happening. The psyche wants to transform, the soul is here to transform and so we keep going through separation experiences, until it starts to be a separation that unifies. Then I'll ask people, that’s first step of a rite of passage is separation. Literally, they used to separate the young person from family, from community and everything, literally. Then they would psychologically also hopefully grasp it. Then the second stage is usually called the ordeal, the challenge or deal. Then I'll ask an audience, "How many people have had an ordeal?" And I'll name the kinds of ordeals; losing a career, finding a career, whatever it is, and hands go up. Then the third step is a return to a knowing community that recognises and understands that you have become a different person because of the separation and the ordeal. I'll say, ""How many people have had that?" Hardly any hands go up and the ones that go up, you really can't trust. I'm joking. But what I mean is some people will claim everything. But what happens and when you are talking about the vision quest, the last step of it is to come back to the elders, or some knowing people who have been through it, and they help the person understand. The story is told, "Here's what happened, in the night, the storm came. Here's the fear I had, then I had a dream." They give this visionary, personal experience of the other world. They give the story of that to the ones who have been through it before, who hopefully know enough to be able to help interpret it and figure out a way to carry it. Then after that, those people are different. They were considered different people. They were awakened. Everybody awakens to who they are because each person is unique. Nature only makes originals. The other thing missing in the modern world is people don't know each person born as a unique being. No trees are the same. No two cedar trees are the same. No two flowering bushes are the same. No human soul is the same. It's that uniqueness that really allows us to say, "No, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it. Maybe I've never seen it before. Maybe people say it can't be done. But I'm going to do it because this unique quality knows where it wants to go." When you have a culture that doesn't have that, you have people that look grown up, and they're not very grown.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's a poverty of elders, of elders being, that there's older people, but an elder is gained wisdom, has been on the path of wisdom throughout their life. That's such an essential part. It's our job to become those elders, to help and be them and be on the path, so that we can be the elders that lead the people of this next world through these initiations and they can come to and say, "Hey, it's all falling apart." And we can say, "Oh, yes. I know the falling apart. I know the putting back together. Come here, my child. Let's talk about this." Not that that doesn't exist. I've been with many great, great, great elders, my different spiritual teachers. My grandmother was an elder in a way. I was very, very lucky. I didn't have any grandfathers in my family, but I've been around them but that's not the most common thing. A lot of times, people, like you said, they've never gone through their own rites of passage, transformation, the understanding of story and culture, to be able to guide us. I think it's on us now, to become that class of people, which is very, very important, which is with the wise ones, the real wise ones.

MICHAEL: So then a couple of things come to mind. One, is the old idea is, the old Greek word for wisdom means dark knowledge. So wisdom is knowing darkness and light. Wisdom isn't knowing all the bright stuff. It's understanding the darkness, the shadow, the loss, and the light, the recovery and the brilliance. So that's the first thing. You want elders who have fallen down hard, and have figured out how to get out.

AUBREY: Amen. 

MICHAEL: That's what you want. The elders are surprising, they're not like the elected ones, the ones who get elected. They're not like the perfected ones. The word mentor enters the Western world through "The Odyssey", the story of "The Odyssey", in the first book of "The Odyssey". A mentor is an old sailor, who was wandering on the beach at the same time when the young prince, representing all youths, who's lamenting the collapse of the world around him and wailing and lamenting by the ocean, by the shore, and they come together, the old sail of the old salt, and the young, wounded person come together. It's interesting that he's a sailor. The old saying is smooth seas make bad sailors. If you're going to learn sailing, you have to be in the rough water, or when the rough water comes, you'll go down. The mentors are those who have been down, so when the young person says, "I made a big mistake," or "I'm really down," a genuine, I know what you mean. You don't have to prove that you can feel it when someone is meeting you in that space. So to me, the elders are that mixture of deep experience of pain and having worked with that, and then whatever brilliance is natural to their own psyche. But one other thing that's interesting. So I've studied all the different cultures, particularly, studied rites of passage in order to figure out what had happened to me. That's how I got into it. I found a tribe in Africa, a small tribe and just two paragraphs in a book about how they see the initiation. They said, "When we're initiating young people, we're waking the elder or the sage in them." Brilliant idea that there's an inner sage that gets awakened in the rite of passage. And they say, "And when we're initiating the elders, we're reviving the eternal youth in them." I just dropped the word right there and I said, "Wow." But we're in that tribe. Psychologically, it's called the puer aeternus. The eternal youth is inside everybody, and the old sage is inside everyone. To me, that's valuable because, to me, the elders, it's not a person, it's a condition. To be youth, the youth is a condition. There's not a person who is actually youth, it's a condition, the youthful condition. The elder is the elder condition, it comes and goes. That allows the elders to fall asleep a lot, and still be elders. But also, it means that everybody is really walking around with their inner youth, still carrying the dream of their life, and a sage potential, at least, that can kick in at various times. I like the idea of seeing it as an inner dynamic as opposed to a person, because the elders have done a lot of damage, people who stood as the elders, in religions, stood as the elders in certain tribal situations, and then became the heavy hand of knowledge, or the heavy hand of wisdom. The idea that, as we get older, we're also also supposed to get younger. And when we're younger, there's a wise part of us that is present also. At least, I like that.

AUBREY: The flexibility, the playability of a young tree versus an old tree. It's those both inborn qualities. A beautiful way to look at it.

MICHAEL: The deep roots of the elder feeding the sprouting branches of the next version of the tree. Like in working with young people and we have our organization, Mosaic, where we've done decades of mentoring. The project is always be with the most at-risk people. One reason for that is young people really deserve some help when they're lost, for whatever reasons. In the modern world, young people are often lost. The whole project was aimed at that. Then it turns out that when someone is lost, they're closer to being found than people that think they know where they're going. So that was an interesting thing to find out. You find out that when people have fallen out of culture, they're ready to step into something else. There's a whole lot of learning at that edge that we went through. But one of the things that was beautiful to learn about was how mentoring is this dynamic where, in theory, mentor, as in the original story, is the old sailor who's been around, the old salt knows what's going on. But what happens in the process of mentoring is sometimes the younger person knows better what the next step is. That's just an amazing thing because then you're seeing the old salt in the young person, or the hidden sage in that young person. Mentoring is this wild exchange on a psychological level. The other thing I learned about that was also amazing. We were doing these projects and working with youth, mostly in poor communities all around the country. There's times where I would feel overwhelmed or I was overworked or I didn't know, or I was afraid, I didn't know the next step, only to have the young people involved first of all, say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. You have to be okay because we're listening to you, and we're following your steps." And then second of all, so they were encouraging me, take a step, we'll back you up and then also have them suggest or get a vision of the next step and realize wow, they don't know it, but they were seeing ahead of themselves and ahead of me, and you realize what a beautiful way to learn, what a beautiful way to grow. I think that's part of the next world that we're going to try to find. Mentoring is the original organic form of teaching and learning. I think it's due for a comeback.

AUBREY: So meet the mentor. This is a classic level in the hero's journey. I'm very familiar with the hero's journey, and I'm less familiar with, there's a school of critique of the hero's journey, that the hero's journey only takes us so far and that the story is limited. I haven't gone down that and explored the critique of the hero's journey. But I'm interested to just hear from you because the hero's journey story seems pretty solid to me. I've been able to map the different levels and I know there's different versions but the classic 12 levels of the hero's journey. It's been very potent as a guiding story for myself, and a lot of the people that I know, but what are your thoughts on the hero's journey story as something to guide us, and where is it potentially lacking or where could it use an update in general?

MICHAEL: Well, it's a great story. As Joseph Campbell wrote, it has universal application. Hero stories are found in all cultures but there are a couple of problems, I think. I remember the first time I read "Hero with a Thousand Faces", Campbell's book on it, a long time ago. Very early on, he says two things that are important. One, he says he got the ideas from a book called "Rites of Passage" by a Dutch anthropologist whose name is escaping me in the moment. He says that this framework came from that work, it's a book called "Rites of Passage". That's interesting. In other words, he wasn't shaping it simply from looking at stories. He actually had picked up this framework, which is a rite of passage framework. That's amazing, all by itself, happens really early. I'm going like this because it's like the bottom of the first page. Then he says that this is the monomyth and that's where I think it goes wrong. There is no monomyth. Myth, by nature, is multiple. Soul is multiple. Nature is multiple. Monomyth is like falling under the spell of monotheism. The idea that there's one story or one way is a certain mindset. So Campbell apparently got that from James Joyce. So Campbell was a big student of James Joyce. James Joyce was doing this wild rewrite of history and mythology. His first big book is "Ulysses". He's rewriting "The Odyssey" but he's writing it with a poetic wild imagination. He referred to the monomyth but he was being ironic, I'm pretty sure. So Campbell picks the idea up from the poet, Joyce, and doesn't quite get the irony. I worked with Joseph Campbell, briefly. That does seem possible to me, that he missed that irony. So what I want to say is it's not the only story. It's a fantastic story. The other thing that's so interesting about it, that you probably know it, because you've really studied it, not that many pages onward, he says, "After a person responds to the call that awakens the hero, they fall into a descent." He says it right there. When people imagine the hero part of it, they often leave out the dissent. That's critical, because that means that the person is stripped bare, going down. You get the psyche awakening, not the ego taking charge. So a hero in the modern western world is a problematic idea like when someone says, "I alone can fix it." The message there is don't vote for that. That's mania. That's heroicism supported by narcissism. You watch what happens to the hero in the Hollywood movies as it goes on and on. It gets more exaggeratedly muscular, gets more violent and so on. There's that kind of problem. So I wrote a book called "The Genius Myth". What I was trying to do was tap an old western root and see it differently. Genius, I mentioned already, means the spirit that's already there. So when a person is born, they're born with the Spirit. The other word for that spirit is genius. It doesn't mean everybody's a genius. It means everybody has some genius. Genius refers not to the highest talent or the greatest IQ. It refers to a giftedness that's natural to that person. So my concern about the hero's myth is people could be moving away from their own deep interior. My other concern would be that it's too masculine perhaps and it seems to leave out those people who can't measure up to heroics. Genius means everybody has gifts, everybody has aim, and they already have it. You don't have to go find it. You have to awaken to it. That's ultimately what the hero story says but it's not how it's understood. So that in the modern world, like recently when they had the Olympics, I liked that everybody's going for the gold, but it's pretty literal like if they don't get the gold, they didn't do it. No. Failing to get the gold could be a great thing. Joseph Campbell was in the last tryouts to be a runner at the Olympics. He was in the race that decided. The winner of that race was going to join the Olympic team. He was going for the gold. I remember being at this conference after Joseph Campbell died to honor Joseph Campbell. I was on a panel and someone asked a biographer did Joseph Campbell have regrets? The biographer said, "Yeah, he regretted that as he was running this race and was he going to be on the Olympic team, he looked back to see if anybody was close to him, and someone passed him and beat him and he didn't get on the team. That was his big regret." And everybody went, "Oh!" And I went, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute--"

AUBREY: One moment is Orpheus. The cost of his whole Olympic dreams.

MICHAEL: If your genius is to become the only and best-known mythologies in the Western world, looking back makes a whole lot of sense. In looking back, he became Joseph Campbell. In winning the Olympics, he might have been somebody else. It's a different story. It was a really interesting discussion. I think the error that I see is calling it the monomyth and then saying that all stories follow that. No. I try to imagine the way we've been talking about the world and all of the damage in the world. It takes so much genius to fix that. It can't be restricted to a certain kind of person. It has to be each girl that's born, each child that's born that winds up being transgendered, you name it. The psyche is as multifaceted as the forest with all of its strange plants. That's what we're part of. That's what we're supposed to be rejoining. There has to be many, many stories. A lot can be learned from the hero's journey and then there are other stories that go in different ways. In mythology, there are many other stories. I think the hero's journey was a good fit for the contemporary Western psyche. And it's the only story that's ever been mythologically known in the whole culture, since I've grown up. I mean, it's amazing. There isn't any other story that if you mention it, people will go, "Oh, yeah, I get it." There has to be other stories because not everybody's going to fit into that journey. There's so many strange journeys. So that's my only trouble with it, the tendency to turn something into the doctrine of how it's done. If the primary initial imagination is that everyone is unique, then that means there's going to be unique steps in that person's initiation, and in their journey, and there has to be room for that especially when the world is so heavy and so tragic, to have each young person be able to imagine that what they're looking for is already inside them, and they might find it by looking inside, they may not get the opportunity to follow it into the world, like most people see the hero's journey. So that's my take on that.

AUBREY: That's beautiful, it makes me quite eager to read your book, "The Genius Myth" and actually understand that as a different story, because I totally agree with you. This idea of our unique self and our unique genius, this is deeply rooted in my own personal belief system. That's exactly what we're here to do, is to live our unique name self, the story that's woven into our DNA, woven into our true self, without which the whole universe, cosmos, God would be incomplete; without us singing this song and adding it to the chorus. Meanwhile, we're just so busy trying to copy somebody else's song or copy somebody else's story, that we're not being the original that nature intended us to be. Of course, we all have our own iterations and variations of that story and trying to collapse everything into one story just goes against this deep, deep first principle of understanding who we are. I applaud you for creating the flexibility in the framework to offer some new stories and hopefully more can emerge as new stories are needed. I think that's really important.

MICHAEL: Well, I learned it from working with young people that were in trouble and just realized, wow, they have to be met where they are. We're working with gang kids. I remember working in Chicago with Latino gang kids. People are always trying to say to them, "You really have a future." And you just watch their reaction, they don't believe it, they don't trust that. There's no evidence given to them. But I noticed another thing, they didn't have a past. They had been separated from their own past, their world, la vida loca, the crazy world, the street world, because they didn't have a connection to their own Latin roots in a way. You can't get a future if you don't have a past. Well, we began doing what we always do anyway, but is working with the past, telling stories that could come from their past and seeing how that feels. In order to have a future, you have to have an integrated basis. So you start to learn how erroneous it is to bring a fixed message into a fluid situation, and how mistaken it can be to miss the opportunity to meet a young person or any person where they exactly are. Ikkyū, the Zen poet, sometimes called the criminal monk--

AUBREY: He was a rascal, but one of my favorites.

MICHAEL: He said, "You can't help but be who you are and where." That's the step. We're talking about before, being willing to not know and being in the darkness. That's the step of the journey, where we are then the only place we can come from, we can't help to be who we are, which is a reference to that uniqueness inside and where we are. So that talks about forgiveness. That talks about acceptance. That's what we learned working with young people, accept them as who they are, where they are, and then let them indicate what it is they need right now. They might not need the future, they might need the past. They might not need challenge, they might need healing. That began to open up a lot of roads, and then I noticed what stories they would respond to. That's really interesting. And young people are looking for stories. They're looking for stories. Everybody.

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. We all are. I cannot resist, and I'm going to trust my own desires for this, because there's a story that I don't understand and I haven't earnestly attempted to understand it but it's been implanted in my psyche for a long time. It started when... I study a lot of classical mythology, but I went to Villa Borghese in Rome, and they have a Bernini Statue of "Il Ratto Persephone", "The Rape of Persephone". Hades is grabbing the goddess. Hades, the God of the Underworld is grabbing the Goddess of Spring. It is one of the most spectacular pieces of art, if not the most spectacular piece of art I've ever seen. I just walked around it for hours. The way that his hands are melting into her flesh that's carved out of marble and it looks so soft, everything about it is just stunning. It's a stunning piece of art. It gets me curious to ask you, from a mythological, mythopoetic standpoint, what is the story of Hades and Persephone, taking her down to the underworld and then allowing her to emerge as spring? What is this myth actually pointing to? What is it trying to tell us?

MICHAEL: Well, the first thing I would say is to realize it's a mystery. So the ancient peoples in Rome, Italy and Greece, and many other places, understood that we're living in a mystery. The world of modern science is almost a pretension that everything can be solved but they exclude the mysterious things, usually. They leave them out. They don't bring them into the laboratory. "Let's bring Persephone to the laboratory and see what happened." No. They take things that they can work with, and they leave the rest outside. The ancient people were in on the mystery. This is a tricky one and one of the things that that gives the warning sign is the word rape, which comes from rapacious and is related to raptor birds and all kinds of, every word has its own story. But in the modern world, I think we have to be careful because rape is a very common thing, and in particular, women getting ready raped and abused sexually and so on. So it makes it even hard to talk about. I think the first level of consideration has to be understanding the damage being done by actual rape, literal rape and sexual abuse. What happens there is someone is pulled into the underworld by the wrong person at the wrong time for the wrong reason. It's like you said earlier, a literalization of a myth. It's extremely destructive and it's strangely a negative initiation that often is left unfinished. So the wound is wide open. So that has to be said.Then it also seems to me important to figure out who is Persephone. So it's not a woman just the way Hades isn't a man. Nowadays, you have to say that because people used to understand that you're sculpting these things, because you're making a physical, artful representation of an unseen, imaginary mythical thing and then you're putting it in the center of a fountain, as if to say this story is like a fountain that will keep telling itself, which is the nature of myth. They actually knew what they were doing. And then you put that story in the middle of the square, and you give the square a name that reminds everybody there is an underworld. By the way, you could get pulled down there today. They knew what they were doing. Nowadays, you have that lack of imagination, a lack of mythological grasp. So sometimes you can see what a story is about by looking at it from the end. Persephone winds up being the person, the entity, who spends half the year in the underworld, and half the year in the upper world. She's a goddess of both worlds. She is a representation of the mystery embodied, the capacity to understand the darkness in the deep world, and the capacity to be resplendent in the upper world. If you look at that at the end, then the word rape has a different meaning, and really dangerous because of the literalization of sexual desire and all the things that are wrong in contemporary society. Hades is one of the gods of the underworld. Usually, the story is Persephone or... It wasn't just Persephone, there were many figures. Just as there were the eternal youths, the Adonis and all of the ones that could do all the youthful male things, there was a whole number of the young female figures who would fall under the term Kore, K-O-R-E, which meant the eternal feminine. Usually, she's in a field somewhere and she sees a flower she has never seen before. It's when she reaches for that flower that Hades pulls her down. There's really mysteries there. There's deflowering, but it's not supposed to be literal, it's psychological. It represents, in a funny way, the fact that the feminine knows the underworld as well as the upper world and often better than the masculine characters. And if Hades is also death, then it tells you that a sudden recognition of the fact that death is in the world pulls her down. There's lots of ways to open it up but it is not about male and female. That's the literalizing, collapse of imagination, in the modern world. So this is also in a strange way, if one is careful, it becomes part of the initiation or rites of passage for the girls to become women. Really complicated, really mysterious, really misunderstood. For instance, the part of the rite of passage for a girl is to realize that women, in a sense, carry death and birth inside themselves. So for the period of time from when the menses start until the men's menses stop, menopause, from menstruation until menopause, during that period, roughly speaking, a woman will have death pass through her body every month with the menses. The menses are washing out, generally speaking, two eggs that could have been fertilized and become humans. And so death is moving through, tied to the moon, which goes through its phases, including the darkness of the moon. The inner dynamic of the woman is tied to that. Then the moon fails again, and the same body that had had death moving through it, gathers vitality again and then there are more eggs that could become humans. So that's part of the inner life of a woman, which is totally misunderstood and usually feared by the masculine. Women have amazing power. They contribute, they grow people inside, and they give birth to full-formed human beings. It is a mystery, it is a wonder, and not something that men can do. When you see the big battle in the United States, for instance, between pro-life and pro-choice, the solution to that is to have women really talk about their own psyche and their own body. It shows the division of the culture that those two things can't be seen as what actually is inside a woman all the time. I hope I'm making sense. Tricky stuff. Tricky stuff.

AUBREY: Absolutely, absolutely. I think one of the reasons I potentially might have been guided to this is if spring itself, which represents life, its life, it's the goddess being born again. It's Mother Earth sprouting in flowers and life force itself and Hades being the shadow masculine, in certain aspects, that is driving this world, destroying the world, polluting the oceans, driving us into the underworld, literally pulling Persephone, pulling life into the underworld. In some ways, obviously moving beyond. I'm so glad you made that distinction and it's an important one about the literalization of it. But moving beyond that, even if the goddess gets pulled down, if the goddess gets pulled down into the underworld, she will rise again, she will rise again in another cycle and bring back forth that life. In some ways, it feels like culturally, we're going through this moment where we've been in this just taking, taking, taking and disrespecting, of the earth and the feminine principles of the earth, and brought that into the underworld in many ways, and bringing that. And then the emergence of the feminine and the lifeforce principle is going to bring the new spring, that's coming. It seems like we can almost look at this from a cultural lens, as one of these other renewal stories of the descent, then ultimately leading to the rivivification?

MICHAEL: Part of the tricky thing is, part of that is for women. Women aren't identical with the feminine or identical with the goddess, just as men are not Zeus. That's a real tricky, false--

AUBREY: Disambiguating gender from actually the masculine and feminine principles.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. When you literalize it, then you get these guys who want to throw lightning bolts everywhere if they think they're Zeus. You don't want that to be happening. But women actually know this cycle. They are born into this embodied sense of life and death. The Earth is a womb and tomb. Womb and tomb, that's the nature of it. I like to look at things backwards, get to the end, and look back. So if we say we're going to have another world, and it's not going to be the same as the last world, then if we get in that place and look back, everything that's wrong with the world as it exists now, is symptomatic of what will be trying to happen. So if the world that we've had so far has become dominated by exaggerated masculine energy, the need to dominate things, muscular approach, it's mostly men in charge, however you want to talk about it; I don't know how to break it down exactly; then the next world has to have a resurgence of the feminine. It has to have a renewal of the understanding. I remember someone saying to me, I was on stage carrying on, and someone, a woman in the audience, said , "How come you're up there by yourself? Why isn't it you with a woman?" It's a really good question. It was a good challenge. But I said, "I am up here with a woman." And she said, "Where?" And I said, "Inside". In other words, the only way we could understand the story is that we can morph and we can secretly relate to the characters in the story. So there is something feminine inside men. It becomes really essential that it becomes an awakened thing, because from there comes the respect for the feminine and for women who embodied it more than men, let's say. The word respect means to look again, respectare, not to see that statue in some simplistic, literal way. I know you're not doing that. But it means to look at it again. And then it means to look at it again and again, to keep singing. I noticed that that statue was in the fountain. So archetypes, which is another way to look at the feminine and the masculine. Hades, the goddess, they're archetypal forms. They used to say, an archetype is like a riverbed. And sometimes the water is flowing through that riverbed and sometimes it dries up. The archetypes that have had water flowing through them may not be the best archetypes for the next version of the world. Certainly, the feminine has to make a comeback as the proper mystery that it is. Then that allows the masculine to become its mysterious self again, as opposed to its over-identified, over-rationalized, over-muscularized, over-predetermined self. In Irish myths, there are great stories in Irish myths. Irish myths have a lot of humor in them and they have a lot of irony in them. And there's a story in which, and the Irish have lots of heroes, but their heroes are not just spear-throwers. One of their greatest heroes is a poet who can pronounce things that other people might think but can't say. That's a big hero. So their idea of a hero is really multifaceted. Anyway, there's a story. When all the heroes have gathered to take on some big quest, probably a battle but they don't feel heroic, they encounter a bunch of poisonous sheep and they become afraid of those sheep. So all the heroes climb the trees, in order not to be bitten by the poisonous sheep. For a period of time, they're all up in the trees experiencing their own fear. They're saying to each other, "Go down and deal with it." And they're saying, "I'm not feeling it, I'm not feeling it." It tells you something, first of all, that to be a man doesn't mean that you're up for everything all the time. Second of all, I thought it said that to be a man is to be able to discuss your fears. To be a hero is to be able to say that you're afraid and discuss your fears. I just found this great. I love that part of the story. It doesn't tell you how long they're up there. But none of them will go down. They all have these great skills. Anyway, that's why there needs to be lots of stories. There needs to be a realization that there has been an imbalance in the world. I think you said it. When people depreciated the feminine, they almost automatically depreciated the earth. Because feminine, Earth, Mother Earth, all align together archetypically. We have to revision the Earth itself, and the fact that we're Earthlings. I think the next worldview would have to be more inclusive of diversity of all kinds and more inclusive of the feminine mystery. Therefore, ultimately more respectful to each girl becoming a woman. One of the heartbreaking things to me happening in this culture is how much sexual abuse is happening in universities, as well as everywhere else. It goes back to initiation. There's a certain type of initiation for girls in Africa, where after they go through a period of isolation where they're only fed food by the elder women of the tribe and they're also fed stories, through that they become a woman, go from being a girl to a woman, then they're brought back to the whole tribe, and everybody has to be there. The kids and the elders, everybody comes out. They're given this girdle that's made of shells from the depths of the sea that have been woven by the elder women of the tribe. It's like a skirt or a girdle. It's not an accident that the shells are from the depth of the ocean. It's trying to say something about the depth of the feminine. She appears, the girl, all by herself, but now she's a woman, and she has this girdle on. She introduced everybody as a new person. Usually, they have a song and they sing to her. And then at some point, she raises one hand up and the other down. And she says something like, "I am the daughter of the stars, and I'm also the daughter of Mother Earth. I am imbued with both these energies and I am to be respected for that." I forget exactly what she says, but it's something like, "Before someone can touch me, I have to remove the girdle myself." So she's wearing this protection of the ancient sea and the stars and the song and the tradition of the tribe, and saying respect her and respect that she knows when she wants to share aspects of herself or her body or whatever it is. I think how different university would be if that was happening if the vision quest--

AUBREY: And even before that.

MICHAEL: And even before. Because how do you get that back? How do you get that trust back? It has to be by recollecting, remembering the mystery, remembering the intense beauty that is the soul of each person. Each one of those girls has their own genius. One of the good things that's happened in the modern world is you do see girls and women being accepted in many different areas of social life and social work and so on.

AUBREY: And also the feminine principles in the masculine being accepted like men who share their feelings and can express emotions which used to be stifled. This is now much more celebrated. Again, disambiguating feminine from gender. The rise of the feminine is happening. It doesn't mean that you have to discard the masculine. I also think this is a sticky trap. It's not saying get rid of your masculine. It's saying just bring your feminine, bring your feminine to meet your masculine and it's strength. I think that's one of the things that also people have. They need a new story to guide them with, which is not like masculine is bad. Sure, there's toxic masculine, of course, we get it. But it's not that the masculine itself is bad, the masculine principle is important, just as the feminine principles are important. How do we awaken these both? Both wings are the bird of our soul? How do we awaken both so that we can all fly? I celebrate that.

MICHAEL: Part of that is the realization of the mystery, this is the mystery of life and death moving through women in a different way than when it happens in men. Those rites of passage would also be different. Earlier, you were saying we don't have the elders that we need. What happens, in my observation of the female and feminine side of things in modern culture, is as a woman gets older, she gets less respected. The images of the wise old woman are less so than, at least, some of the images of the wise old men. The imagination of the feminine is trapped in the beautiful, young, youthful part of the feminine. And then they realize how much wisdom is lost, how much mystery is lost. I went to Spain when I was younger because I wanted to see and feel flamenco. I wanted to understand it. I just wanted to be bathed in flamenco. So then you're looking for the authentic flamenco rather than the showtime flamenco. That became the journey. I don't think that was a hero's journey. I think it was like a flamenco journey. I finally wound up in this place where they were having a contest for the women flamenco singers and dancers. They come out and they do that stomping, fantastic stuff. The stomping is to call up the spirit of the earth. That's what's happening. It's like sounding the surface of the earth like a drum to awaken the earth's spirit. And so, the competition was that the different dancers would come out and then stomp the earth and do their dances. It was profound. I mean you could stay there your whole life. After a whole number of them had done it, done their dance, out comes this old woman. And you go, wow, she doesn't look quite as, okay, how's she going to do? She very slowly, with the most amazing kind of musical tension of her body, does the same gestures but she does them with this authority and this elegance, that is beyond what anybody had already done. She wins the whole contest because she had duende, they call it duende, the connection to the dark spirit of the earth, duende. She understood her own body, she understood the earth. It was such a display of where that feminine goes. It was beautiful and mind-boggling and accurate as hell. No one complained. Everybody went, "Yeah." That was the duende. It doesn't mean it can't happen to a younger woman or a person. But anyway, we've lost those measures. I mean, there's a real contest, where it's not that you have the best voice, it's that you brought the most earth through your body vocalization. You know what I mean? What is being honored, what is being sought, is more mysterious than what people imagine at this point. 

AUBREY: My wife is half-Hawaiian and her mother is Hawaiian. So she grew up Tahitian dancing. So my wife, gorgeous in the full flower of her gorgeousness and beauty and an amazing dancer, she can shake her hips and move her body in ways that are just mind blowing and stunning. She'll do a little Tahitian dance when we have a family gathering. And then her mother will drop into a hula. The way that she moves her body slowly in this hula, embodying the literal spirit of Hawaii, as if Hawaii came and moved itself to right there in her heart, and in her in her soul, and in her essence, everybody gets to transport there, everybody just starts weeping, just just really weeping. What this really makes me think is, sometimes I think, we can get lost in the idea that we need the stories with the right words, which we do. We need stories with the right words, the right plot, but we also need stories that we can embody, embody through dance, embody through song, embody through ritual. So it may not be enough, as I'm thinking about how do we all support the world in the best way? Well, yes, we need the stories but embodied stories are so much more powerful, because then you get to participate and have the gnosis of the story itself. And that seems where there's just real opportunity to make transformation happen.

MICHAEL: Well, people used to dance all over the earth. People of all ages and all orientations used to dance. The Bushmen of the Kalahari, sometimes called the Pygmies, because they're short of it, they're brilliant, and they're born of the earth and they know that and then nomadic, and they have this close relationship to the earth, and the plants and the animals and the stars and all that kind of stuff. They have a thing called a great dance, where it happens at a certain full moon, and it happens in a certain place. They go to this place, which is apparently kept secret, when it's time to go there with the timing of that moon. Everyone goes, and then when they get there, everyone dances, and everyone sings. They imagine that what they're doing is connecting to the stars and connecting to the moon, and that they're dancing their way back into life. Because in the course of the year, they've lost energy, and they've lost friends, and they've lost whatever they lost. And they have to make their way back to start over again. Rather than watching a ball rolling down some building in Time Square, they all go to this place, and they all dance and they all sing. They imagine that when they sing, it could be true too, that all the animals start to sing with them, and pretty soon, they're resonating all the way to the moon. In that process, they all get renewed. I don't know what the after party is but that's what they do. That's our ancestry is that people danced and it wasn't always the contest for who can do it. It was, sometimes we're just all dancing together and we support each other's rhythmic embodiment. People used to do that during troubled times, gathering ourselves anew because tomorrow we have to face the famine or we have to face the struggles. People would use dance as its own rite of awakening and renewal. I think all that stuff's waiting to be refound and refashioned. We need stories and then we need these ritual forms. All of the arts, originally, were aimed at the divine. In other words, it's really interesting or agonizing when people talk about the music industry. Music's not an industry. It wasn't part of the industrial revolution and it shouldn't be. Music was a way to connect, to express and sustain the relationship between the human and the divine. There's great love songs, but next year, there needs to be new love songs, because it all has to be made anew. That was the old idea that culture, just like nature, was renewing itself all the time and that people were part of the embodied experience of both the death and the renewal, the loss and the reawakening. Since we're at the end of an era, I think that's what's trying to become conscious. I agree. It has to be embodied. When something is embodied, when someone knows it at a bodily level, that's different than believing in it. People say, "Do you believe in myths?" Oh, you don't have to believe in myths. They're not asking you to believe them. They're asking you to enter them and walk around and see what you can learn inside. One of the definitions of myth is a series of lies that tells the truth.

AUBREY: So you know the truth, you know the truth and you don't get lost in the forest lands.

MICHAEL: Was there ever an Icarus that flew too close to the sun and the wax holding the wings on melted? No, I don't think so. But do people, Icarus-like, fly too close to the Sun, which nowadays means the bright stage lights? Yes, all the time. It's a lie that reveals the truth. The arts were all part of that way of knowing, and a way of really bowing to the mystery of life. So for what it's worth, what I've learned from myth, from myths of all different places, the underlying mystery that is connected or somehow implied in almost all of them, is the mystery of life, death, renewal, birth, death, rebirth. That's the mystery. We are in it. We are an expression of it individually and I think we're trying to become a more conscious expression of it, collectively, that the collective rite of passage is learning to walk in that mystery, with some grace and some respect and a greater capacity for imagination. I think that's what we're being pulled into.

AUBREY: If people are hungry for stories, and places to go. I remember reading Edith Hamilton's anthology, I think it's just called "Mythology". I know that you have a whole series of podcasts that tell stories. Definitely, I encourage everybody listening, go check out your podcast, it's Mosaic Voices, right, is the name of it? Is that?

MICHAEL: Living Myth. It's a free podcast called Living Myth.

AUBREY: On mosaicvoices.org, that's your website.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

AUBREY: So definitely check that out. But do you have other recommendations for anthologies of stories? That was definitely a Greco-Roman-focused anthology. So where do you go or where do you point people--

MICHAEL: The last chapter is Myths from Other Cultures. You just threw that in the end. That's the book I read on my 13th birthday. That changed my life. I was this forlorn kid growing up in New York City feeling like I wasn't misunderstood and I didn't have a place. My aunt accidentally gave me that book, she thought it was a history book. I read it that night and it was like, wait a minute, I found the other world, I found a language, I found a mystery and an understanding and I qualified. It didn't matter that I was 13. It didn't matter that the family was poor, it didn't matter that I was the smallest kid in my class. I was now, by virtue of being awake that night, I was invited into that world. So I have a copy of that book right nearby in my library--

AUBREY: Yeah, I have it behind me on the bookshelf.

MICHAEL: There's many, many of them. It's tricky. I may not be a good person for advice on that. But the way I tell stories, I'll read stories from all over. I was doing it this morning. Then I put them down, I walk away and then I'm walking in a field, or walking down a street, and boom, one of the stories comes back, and it just hits me like the wind coming, that story wants me to tell it. That's how I understand it. So the best stories are the stories that want you to learn them, and know them and share them. Where people find them, it's complex. So there are collections. I was, this morning, looking at Native American myths and legends, an amazing collection of Indigenous stories from around what we call America, North America. There's great Irish collections and then there's amazing folktales of Africa. It's just this big territory. As far as understanding myths, Joseph Campbell's teacher wrote an amazing book. I can't remember the title right now but Joseph Campbell was studying art history, and he took a class with the name escaping me, I can't believe it. It's probably on that bookshelf behind me. Well, I can't recommend it, because I can't think of the title...

AUBREY: We can Google it, figure it out, put it in the show notes.

MICHAEL: Yeah, yeah. It's almost there. It's close by. Anyway, there's no per se collection that I think is the best way to go. Do you follow themes? Yeah, nowadays, you can Google it and you put a theme in and it'll give you references. It's like a field, it's like another realm in which we're invited to wander around and you'll suddenly find something; you didn't know you were looking for but darn, there's that story. I really recommend stumbling into the stories. There's an old saying that it's not just that we're thirsty, but the fountain wants us to drink. Once we allow that we don't know and we stumble in the darkness, we're likely to run into the story that we need. The stories want to be found and our hunger is the vehicle.

AUBREY: A lot of times we digest our stories through movies now. We have to understand that the movies have a deep economic incentive. Sometimes those stories can be important and revelatory, and you can unpack them, and you can feel the truth underneath them. Sometimes, actually, the story isn't pointing. It's a series of lies that isn't pointing to the truth. It's actually pointing to another lie. This is what we have to also be mindful of, are some other forms of manipulation that are difficult. I feel personally called to go back and look at some of the old stories, not saying that there aren't beautiful new stories being told but as we form the new stories, to start back at the beginning, and then build new stories from there, and also be mindful of all right, not every story is true, not every myth is actually pointing to truth. Just as we're fallible, sometimes the arts can be fallible as well. To carry that kind of barometer like, "Do you feel it? What do you feel in your body? Can you feel the truth of it? Can you really feel it? There's a part of us that knows and there's a part of us that remembers all the truth. It has to resonate with that part and tickle our instrument in a way where it feels right.

MICHAEL: A myth is more like this water flowing. If we go into it with the idea, I'm going to understand this, I'm going to interpret it and understand it, the myth goes like that. Don't come too close. It's being in the presence of something that is a vehicle or a channel of the unseen, of the divine ultimately. One difference between myths and fairy tales or myths and folktales is in myths that gods and goddesses are there. That's one of the differences. It's not always the defining thing. But that's one of the differences. In a way, you could say, everyone's really looking for love and everybody's really looking for contact with the divine, a connection to the divine. It's interesting. Myth is that, and you don't have to understand the story. I often describe a story as mythological acupuncture. A part of that story will stick you exactly where you need a needle. If you accept that, just a description of a Persephone in a story or in an artwork and allow it to penetrate, then it begins giving knowledge and doing healing. It's a wonderful, mysterious journey into a territory, mostly forgotten but nearby, just the way the river of memory is nearby in the underworld.

AUBREY: Well, thank you for being a river of memory for all of us and for all the work you do. It's been such a pleasure to be able to drop in here with you.

MICHAEL: Likewise, really good conversation. Thank you for all that you bring to the conversation. 

AUBREY: Of course.

MICHAEL: I do a lot of interviews and sometimes I'm wondering what's going on on the other side. I notice we're both backed up with books there but anyway.

AUBREY: Maybe there's something to that. Thank you and thank you for your kind words.

MICHAEL: Thank you. Thank you. Good to be with you. 

AUBREY: Thank you everybody. Goodbye.